


all you have is your fire

by voodoochild



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Mother-Son Relationship, Parent/Child Incest, Past Rape/Non-con, Period-Typical Sexism, Prison Sex, Prostitution, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 11:34:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12131574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: Polly and Michael in prison, staying alive and making plans. [Post-3.06, spoilers for all aired episodes.]





	all you have is your fire

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Hozier's "Arsonist's Lullabye", a Shelby song if I have ever heard one. 
> 
> You can blame Beth and **ceebee-eebee** for this. All aboard the train to the special hell...

She shakes under his hands, like a girl half her age. Like a girl of his.

They have to be quieter than quiet, absolutely silent. There's less than no privacy in jail to begin with, and if word got out, it would become worse than it already is. They're Shelbys, targets painted on them already, and the two of them more than Arthur and John. They're old hands in Winson Green, but Polly Shelby and Michael Gray? They're fresh meat. Queen of the goddamn Shelbys and her shiny new princeling.

The first night, she could barely take the sounds of Michael snarling and fighting. The second, she couldn't at all. Screamed herself hoarse, threatened the guards every way she knew how, and they'd relented. Thrown him into her cell at night, in payment for a fuck with the warden and the promise of a thousand pounds Esme smuggled on a visit.

He wouldn't speak to her at first - incensed at the way she'd secured a measure of protection. Her boy has always been disgusted by what he'd call her whoring, but Polly knows, it's the best - and sometimes only - way to get by. Michael had sat and sulked, and by the fifth day, finally had it out with her. Even he has to admit this situation isn't her fault.

Neither of them would speak his name, then. Neither of them will do it now.

As the weeks went by and nothing changed, no rescue came, Michael finally learnt what she's known - you have to save yourself, and you have to do it with the tools available. He learnt to use his body the way his cousins had, calisthenics in the cell, in the yard, finally able to stand toe to toe with the inmates and not win by his wits. Oh, he's never been a bad fighter - he's hell in a tight corner, a vicious little thing like her - but now his presence is enough to make a man consider trying his luck.

She thinks the morning he beat Bill Morton senseless for groping her is when she first thought of it. He'd been covered in mud from the yard, blood spattered across his pretty face and a nasty shiner on his eye, and he sat down at her feet so she could clean him up as best she could. But for his broader shoulders and curling hair, he could be his cousin ten years ago. 

Squinting through the blood at her, he says "you did this for him."

She sighed. "John and Arthur more often, but yes."

"Am I like him?"

"You know you are. Got his brains and that anger."

Michael flinched, spat out the next words like the curse they were. "Shelby anger."

"Yeah."

He reached out for her, hand gripping her wrist, and he looks starved. Pared-down. All the baby fat has left him, and what's replaced it is those ice-blue Shelby eyes, his father's jaw, and her own startled-quirked mouth. He looks like Thomas, true, but he looks more like himself than she thinks she'd realized. 

"Stay angry," he said, gaze locked with hers, ignored how close they were, how her chest was rising and falling inches from his. "I don't want you forgetting why we're here, what he did. What we did."

She's not like to forget.

(And if she wants for longer, finer-boned hands on her, if she wants for the shadow of ink under her mouth as she kisses his chest, if she wants for a narrower frame and shoulders that have always been her shelter . . . she can't have, any more.)

Campbell's bloodless face haunts her dreams, his sticky grasping fingers leaving ghost-bruises on her thighs. She wakes up in a cold sweat from it sometimes, and the only thing that keeps Michael from worrying is that there are more nights he's the one sitting bolt upright and staring at his shaking hands. That night is one of those nights, and he lifted the thin blanket covering her, crawled in beside her.

He was shaking, eyes wide and blown-blue, and she took his face in her hands. "You're here, baby," she breathed, "you're clean. There's no blood-"

His mouth covered hers, searing-hot and slick, and she couldn't breathe for it. He kissed her deep and hungry, licking into her mouth and groaning for how she opened to him. She combed her fingers through his hair, let him roll her to her back and settle between her thighs. 

_It's wrong_ , she thought then. _It's wrong, it's *wrong*_... and it's the first time in weeks she'd felt like herself again. Like she was Polly goddamn Shelby and not a scared, silly fool letting others fight her battles for her.

"There's always blood, Mum," he had breathed, clutching at her, grinding his hips down. "Always."

She felt as if she were melting for him, the cradle of her hips open and slick and hot, riding up against the thick ridge of his cock. Licked at his lips and bit his pretty lower lip for him, murmuring "you're my sweet boy, and you're my vicious boy, and I love-"

"Jesus," he swore, cut her off. She'd felt his hands sliding up her dress and she shook for it. "Please, can I-?"

She'd wanted to cry out - yes yes _yes_ \- but she'd frozen at the footsteps outside the cell. They both went shock-still, waiting for the door to open, for discovery . . . and the footsteps receded. 

They're careful after that - so achingly careful, she'd slid her dress up and he'd shoved his trousers down, and he'd pressed into her slow enough to both send her shuddering and not shake the rickety bed. She had buried her head in his shoulder, bit down when she needed to, when he rocked and ground against her. Her legs locked over his back, and she'd wanted to scream so *badly*. Let him know how good and sweet it was, and he was whispering "I know, I know, hush, let me, let me" against her neck. 

She wouldn't let him spend in her, that time. Old habits, and all, and she couldn't honestly say where her head was at. Could only curl shiveringly into him, stroking his hair and mopping up with the hem of her slip. She let him do it the next time, and the next - because they're so alike, and all they'd wanted was more. Huddling in their cell, fucking silent as possible. Walking out for food or toilet privileges the next day raw and slick between her thighs, a fiercely shameful kind of pride in it.

(There's so much more she wants with Michael. To go to her knees for him, suck him slow and mean, make him cry out . . . that's just the beginning, and they can't have it. One more thing she blames her nephew for doing.)

On the morning she's released - six months and twenty-two days, for good behavior and because they don't hang women - she smuggles him a knife and a promise. She'll get him and the boys out. She'll make sure everyone who's hurt them has paid. She won't leave him there.

He smiles. 

"Get me out, Mum," he says, "and I'll help you take over, help you get what we've always wanted. I swear it."

They're going to burn the kingdom down, her and her boy. God help anyone in their way.


End file.
